social enterprise

Buying social to help society

Investing profits back in to good causes

If you haven’t come across a social enterprise before, they’re companies who reinvest their profits to address some of the most pressing issues in society.

Like any other business their aim is to make a profit, but it’s what they do with that profit that sets them apart. They’ll either donate or reinvest their money to create positive social change. And that sounds pretty good to us.

Our Green Heart Procurement Programme

In April 2018 we signed up to Social Enterprise UK’s (SEUK) Buy Social Corporate Challenge in partnership with the Cabinet office. Our Green Heart Procurement programme is our commitment to partnering with social enterprises to help them to become part of our supply chain.

Each year, we spend around £750 million across our entire supply chain. We want to spend more of that with companies who are trying to make a difference and in doing so we can help communities across the world. As far as we’re concerned, it’s the right thing to do.

Are you a social enterprise who’s interested in working with us? Email us.

In November 2018 we held a Green Heart Procurement Conference in London bringing together many of our existing supplier partners, a selection of social enterprises and key LV= colleagues. The aim of the day was to share our commitment and invite them to join our exiting challenge and buy social. To see more about the conference please see the short film below produced by Mediorite – a social enterprise who we are partnering with.

We're here today at Coin Street to launch LV's Green Heart Procurement Program. As well as hearing from LV about why social enterprises are so important, we've invited social enterprises to come and pitch to existing suppliers and LV colleagues about what they do. A key part of today is to work with our existing suppliers, explain then the value of working with social enterprises and hope that they'll make changes to their supply chain.

It's important really to support social enterprises because it's a great fit with our long term mission. We were founded 175 years ago to help the poorest in society bury their loved ones with dignity. While the mission has changed, it's still fundamentally the same thing - we want to make the economy and society work better for consumers and for the people we live and work with everyday. To that end, social enterprises give us a great opportunity to extend our reach, through working through their supply chain, through our supply chain to make a real difference to society, by working on causes that matter to us and making a difference to both the economy and society in the long run.

A social enterprise is a business that operates on the open market and it's trying to make a profit from selling a product or service but it uses the profits from the product or service to put back into a social or environmental cause.

The reason it's so important to LV is because we're a mutual business built with a long heritage of doing the right doing good, not just what's easy, but what matters. And in that Green Heart history, that matters more perhaps to us than other businesses. So the fact that we can support social enterprises, work with businesses with the same ethics as us makes all the difference.

What makes a good supplier relationship for us is that we share common values. We spend about half of billion pounds a year through our suppliers, so it's really important we do that in a very socially responsible way.

I'm really pleased to be here today. We are now supplying LV with our soap in the bathrooms and after today I'm really hoping that we're gonna be supplying everyone of LV's suppliers with more soap in the bathroom - creating jobs for so many people with disabilities.

Today is a fantastic opportunity. There are so many of our existing supplier partners here, some wonderful social entrepreneurs, today's about making connections. We can deliver this just by ourselves at LV, we need a lot of our supplier partners indeed all of our supplier partners to play their part in this incredible journey which we're going on.

I found it really interesting actually, there's lots of businesses that I've never come across before and I can really see some benefits. I think it's really important for us about staff engagement and I can see some people getting really excited by some of the products and services available.

I have absolutely come away buzzing. It has really inspired me. I'm really, really amazed at what LV are doing already in this area. And what it's made me think about a lot is what we DWF are doing as a legal business. We're already engaged with some social enterprises but there's so much more we can do. I also want to take it back to the partners and suggest what more we can do - how we can raise this in our agenda and have it as one of our top priorities going forward.

Through us increasingly channelling portions of our three quarters of a billion pounds year annual spend into social enterprise, we want to help them achieve those social purposes to which we were founded and in doing so make this world a better place.

Helping our customers, members and the wider society has always been important to us

This is why it makes a lot of sense for us to invest the money we’re spending in to social enterprises where possible. We’ve committed to...

Train relevant colleagues about buying from social enterprises.

Have fair, accessible and open procurement processes.

Raise awareness of social enterprises across our business.

Work with Social Enterprise UK to find social enterprise suppliers and help it meet its target of £1 billion spent with social enterprises by 2020.

Measure the impact of social buying.

our partnerships

We already partner with some fantastic social enterprises.

Including, WildHearts and BECO who provide us with office supplies and soap.

In turn they invest their profits in proving microfinance loans and entrepreneurial education programmes in 40 countries across the world and in creating jobs for disabled people in the UK. You can read more about their inspiring stories here.

We’re open to working with as many social enterprises as we can across our entire supply chain – if you’re one of these, and are interested in working with us, why not email us and let us know?